America Must Prepare to Face the Foes of the Future

By Christian Brose

Thursday, July 24, 2025

 

‘Ukraine Attacks Russian Air Bases in Far-Reaching Drone Strikes,” the Washington Post reported on June 1. “How Israel’s Mossad Smuggled Drone Parts to Attack Iran From Within,” the Wall Street Journal reported two weeks later. And just like that, the future of warfare has become today’s headline news.

 

Both operations followed a similar pattern: Technologically savvy militaries used large numbers of low-cost, easy-to-produce autonomous systems to inflict damage on their targets — usually sophisticated, highly capable, and effectively irreplaceable pieces of military hardware that cost orders of magnitude more than did those operations to the attackers. Indeed, in Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine likely expended less than $150,000 in weaponized drones to inflict a loss of up to $7 billion in Russian strategic bombers that had taken decades to produce.

 

What is more remarkable about headlines such as these is how familiar they have become. Back in 2020, many were caught off guard when Azerbaijan used low-cost unmanned aircraft and artificial-intelligence-enabled attack drones to rapidly defeat Armenia’s tanks and other traditional forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. Now, on a nearly daily basis, Russia bombards Ukrainian cities with one-way attack drones — effectively low-cost cruise missiles — mass-produced in Iran. For its part, Ukraine, despite lacking a traditional navy, has sunk Russia’s warships and pushed the rest of its Black Sea fleet out of Crimea with cheap, explosive-laden drone boats. By some estimates, millions of drones were expended on the battlefield in Ukraine in 2024 alone.

 

The U.S. military has not escaped this revolution in warfare. Its bases and personnel across the Middle East have been under nearly constant drone attack for years. Three U.S. service members were lost to such attacks in 2024. In recent combat against Houthi militias, the U.S. has lost MQ-9 Reaper aircraft worth more than $200 million and three F-18 fighter jets, while expending dozens of multimillion-dollar missile interceptors to defend U.S. warships from one-way attack drones that cost just tens of thousands of dollars. Years of repeated drone incursions on military bases in the United States — bases that host billions of dollars’ worth of advanced aircraft, ships, and weapons — demonstrate how something like Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb could happen in our own homeland.

 

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The future of warfare is here, now. If we are to rise to the challenge, new technologies are important, but they are only part of the answer. What is needed instead is a broader reimagining of how the U.S. military builds and projects power.

 

America’s current model of military superiority has remained largely unchanged since the end of the Cold War. We have organized our military around small numbers of expensive, exquisite, hard-to-produce weapons systems. This has reflected assumptions that U.S. policymakers and military planners have made for a generation. We have assumed that there would be no enduring competition or conflict against a peer adversary and, therefore, that the United States would technologically outmatch any adversary on any battlefield. We would not have to regenerate or replenish our own military forces, because we would not shoot many weapons, suffer many combat losses, or face the prospect of protracted conflict. Our wars would be over in weeks, days, or even hours. These assumptions underpin the development of most current major U.S. weapons programs, and yet they run contrary to most wars in U.S. history, which were protracted struggles of production, attrition, and regeneration.

 

Government and industry, believing that ever smaller numbers of ever more exquisite and costly weapons would secure military advantage, went about making these weapons nearly impossible to produce at real scale — and we are therefore unable to rapidly replace them. Their production depends on specialized and scarce labor, noncommercial and defense-specific supply chains, manual and artisanal production processes, rare materials and subcomponents. Our weapons are military luxury goods. This is why years’ worth of war games have led to the same conclusion: The United States would likely run out of critical munitions in the first week of a war against the Chinese Communist Party.

 

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, since the 1980s, China, our main strategic competitor, has been hyper-industrializing while the United States has been deindustrializing. As a result, China now possesses an industrial base with a production capacity that dwarfs our own in nearly every area that matters to national power and military competition, from shipbuilding and munitions to drones and rare earth elements. It has taken America four decades to get itself into its present predicament, and the unfortunate but unavoidable reality is that we will not recover these traditional industrial advantages quickly, easily, or, in many cases, at all.

 

This is doubly true for the U.S. military. Throwing more money at our traditional weapons programs and their brittle industrial base will not create more military power on a relevant timeline — namely, this decade, when the Chinese Communist Party may try to take Taiwan by force. (The Pentagon projects that most of its “new” weapons programs will deliver during the 2030s or 2040s.) More money cannot massively increase our traditional weapons platforms because these were never designed to be mass-producible.

 

While we must recognize this limitation, that does not mean that traditional defense programs and their related industrial base should be sacrificed. There are some things that only stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, and exquisite munitions can do. Such military platforms and weapons will continue to play an indispensable role in future U.S. military operations, especially in the hands of creative commanders who will devise new and disruptive ways to operate them. It would be equally inadvisable for the United States simply to try to replicate what has worked so well for the Ukrainians or Israelis — or, for that matter, the Russians or Iranians. Those solutions have been optimized for the shorter-range, tactical realities of battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East, not the larger geographies and more advanced threats that the United States is facing, especially in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. military will not deter or win a war against China with quadcopters, first-person-view drones, tube artillery, and small kamikaze boats alone.

 

There is a new, different model of military power available to the United States that is achievable, affordable, and necessary for future U.S. victories.

 

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America’s new approach to military power must reflect the brutal lessons that combatants are learning in Ukraine and on other modern battlefields. And it should be based on different assumptions about the character of conflict: Future wars, like most of our past ones, will feature large-scale combat losses and require the sustained production and regeneration of combat power. This requires a different type of arsenal — autonomous systems and smart weapons designed from the start to be rapidly and cheaply mass-produced, rebuilt, and replaced. These would be consumable items, not luxury goods.

 

Much has been made of the vaunted “arsenal of democracy” during World War II, and for good reason. But that historic exercise in industrial mobilization and mass production succeeded not simply because of a large infusion of government resources but also because those weapons were designed to be mass-producible. For example, the Ford company manufacturers who managed the Willow Run factory could produce a new B-24 every 63 minutes because automobiles and bomber aircraft were not wildly different from one another in terms of their designs, production processes, supply chains, and workforces. This would be impossible today, because a B-21 stealth bomber is as different from a commercial car as it is possible to be.

 

Fortunately, Congress and the Department of Defense are starting to get serious about the urgent need to harness commercial technologies and manufacturing practices to create a new arsenal of democracy. Under the Biden administration, the “Replicator” initiative began mobilizing industry, both old and new, to produce thousands of small drones. The Trump administration is going further. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent directive to enable senior commanders to buy small, unmanned aircraft without any bureaucratic impediments could begin to create something akin to a competitive, quasi-commercial domestic market to deliver the “drone dominance” he seeks. At the same time, a small number of important U.S. and allied programs are seeking to deliver disruptive military capabilities on a far more ambitious scale. Multiple defense companies, including my own, Anduril Industries, have competed and been selected to build some of these new capabilities.

 

One such program is the U.S. Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, which is effectively a low-cost, mass-producible, modular cruise missile that can fly 500 miles with a 100-pound payload. Anduril’s solution, called Barracuda, is designed around and built with commercial materials, components, and supply chains. It can be assembled by modestly skilled workers with fewer than ten tools available at commercial hardware stores. These weapons will never be as capable as legacy cruise missiles, but they will be much easier and an order of magnitude cheaper to produce. This could change how U.S. commanders fight: Rather than expend all of their traditional cruise missiles in the opening week of a war, for example, they could instead fire mixed salvos — lots of cheap new weapons paired with one or two exquisite old weapons — that cost less overall and keep them in the fight longer.

 

Another example of such an innovation is the Royal Australian Navy’s Ghost Shark program — an autonomous submarine the size of a school bus that will be able to launch new, low-cost torpedoes. A traditional Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo costs nearly $5 million, and a Virginia-class submarine runs upward of $4 billion. Together, they are an unrivaled military capability. And yet, at the same cost, we could produce hundreds of Ghost Shark vehicles armed with thousands of newly designed low-cost torpedoes. Thus the new and the old can complement each other and enable commanders to put more weapons under the water to deter China’s massive and rapidly growing blue-water navy.

 

New programs like Ghost Shark and Barracuda will cost billions of dollars, but some perspective is needed. Consider the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, an autonomous fighter jet that the U.S. Air Force is planning to buy in the hundreds from multiple defense companies over the next five years, at a planned total cost of roughly $6 billion. This is a lot of money — until it is compared with the U.S. Air Force’s budget over that same five-year period, which is close to $1 trillion. The Air Force will therefore get a game-changing capability by the end of this decade for less than 1 percent of its total budget.

 

New weapons like these are still unfortunately rare among U.S. and allied defense programs, but it need not be this way. It is not difficult to imagine two or three dozen more such programs — encompassing autonomous vehicles of all classes and long-range weapons of all kinds. If each of these programs had the ambition to increase our military capabilities and to complement our more traditional and limited defense programs, they could help establish a new form of U.S. military advantage and the industrial capacity needed to deliver it on a relevant timeline. What’s more, all of this could be achieved at an ultimate cost of roughly 2 percent of the current U.S. defense budget.

 

America can win the wars of the future. We still lead the world in the technologies that matter most, especially artificial intelligence. We have all of the human capital and all the money we need, both in and out of government, to carry out a change of this scope. In addition to our more established defense primes, we have dozens of new, well-capitalized companies that did not exist a decade ago but are now eager to do this work. And while it is always possible to further reform our defense acquisition, budgeting, and other processes, U.S. leaders have all the authority they need to create new defense programs that reimagine and rebuild the U.S. military. We are limited only by our will, imagination, and sense of urgency. The lack of these virtues could still bedevil us, as they have before, but our destiny remains firmly in our own hands.